First pass dropping the character controller into my test environment. This is all running in realtime including hair and cloth. Character and camera input is from an xbox controller. Pretty pleased with how this is looking! I had a go with Wwise and working in some basic interactive sound fx. Portal sound is from my Moog Minitaur.
games
Building a Character Controller /
I played The Last Guardian recently and despite really liking it was was disappointed with the game feel, I felt the unresponsive character and camera controls really let down an otherwise great game. This got me thinking pretty hard about 3rd person character control. I decided to try making a third person character controller that uses realistic animation while still being responsive to input and having great game feel. These design goals are pretty much orthogonal to each other and it has been quite challenging to get something that feels and looks right.
Recently I enjoyed playing through Horizon Zero Dawn. I think the character control is probably the best I've ever played, the animation looks fantastic and the control feels very precise and responsive. I have set out to make something that feels and looks as good!
I started out trying lots of third party character controllers, but none of them really felt right - if the animation looked good they were laggy and unresponsive to play with, or if they were responsive the animation looked unrealistic. I wanted to use mocap with root motion and not do an arcade style controller. Next I started going through all of the character controller tutorials I could find. I came across an old tutorial by John Mac, where he builds a Zelda Windwaker style controller from scratch. Despite the implementation being a little funky, this was really helpful and felt the best by far. Then a colleague pointed me to Paul van Grinsven's GDC talk on Player Traversal Mechanics in Horizon Zero Dawn, where he pretty much lays out the whole setup! Very exciting. I started building the controller again from scratch and have begun incorporating ideas from Paul's talk. This is where I am at so far, it feels a lot better already. Hair and Jacket are simulated in realtime with a PBD solver. Next I'll have a crack at vaulting and jumping.
This has been a really fun excersise, it combines my interests in motion picture editing, simulation, and procedural systems. It's like building a realtime procedural editng system! Plus it's a computer graphics problem that is not related to optimization - a rarity these days.
Jon Mac tutorial:
HZD Player Traversal GDC talk
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024699/Player-Traversal-Mechanics-in-the
Murmuration /
Another toy prototype. I've been playing with steering behaviours and implemented Reynolds "predator" and "evasion" behaviours.
You can play with it here.
The behaviour and environment is all procedurally generated (sorry!) Wind gusts a bit if you press the mouse. Camera follows the black birds around, the black birds hunt the red birds, and the red birds feed on the clouds...
Not very interactive but quite meditative if you watch it for a while.
I'm quite interested in exploring this idea some more and making something bigger with flocking / herding as a central mechanic.
Dragon Kites /
This is a prototype interactive toy I made to learn how to build a simple custom physics engine in Javascript and p5.js.
You can play with it here.
You can blow a gust of wind by clicking in the window to move the kites around.
Not sure where this will go but I think it is a fun toy to play with.
Amoeba Blaster!! /
"fill your games with love and tiny details"
Amoeba Blaster!! is a game I made using p5js, a Processing library for Javascript. It was a project for a coding class I just finished on Kadenze. Apart from the text its all procedurally generated, using the Superformula to draw all of the shapes. No sprites used here! I was really happy with the way this turned out, especially the simple moused based interaction. You can fire and strafe just using a mouse click. The gameplay is also inspired by a great talk by Jan Willem Nijman from Vlambeer on game feel, where he talks about filling your game with love and tiny details, definitely worth watching!
Wolf & Bear Club /
I'm taking the CalArts course "Game Design: Art and Concepts" on Coursera at the moment. So far I'm really enjoying it. It's very story focused and I'm learning a lot about interactive storytelling. For the first assignment in Fran Krause's class "Intro to Game Design" we had to make a single player game that fits on one piece of paper and requires only 2 dice. Feel free to print it out and play, tell me what you think! Download the pdf here.
Win by helping the wolf escape the castle and reach the shooting star before the tailor throws his scissors and snips out the light. If the scissors get to the star before the wolf you loose, if the wolf gets there first you win! Be quick but don't get caught by the bear, or he will club you!